What Should Americans Learn From the Holocaust?

 What Can We Learn?

The Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered by the Germans between 1932 and 1945 is one of history’s great crimes, but what can it teach us? What can we learn from it that we can apply to our own country?

Ordinary People Can Do Great Evil 

One lesson we can learn is that ordinary people will do awful things to protect themselves and their families and to advance their careers. Most of the officials who carried out the Holocaust were not ideologically committed Nazis. They did not hate the Jews enough to kill them. The perpetrators of the Holocaust were just soldiers or civil servants who followed orders. That does not absolve them from responsibility, but it helps us to see that as individuals they were not all monsters. They were mostly people who were trying to pursue their own interests in an evil system.

Today, in the United States, we can see a similar process at work. The masked ICE thugs who sweep people up off the streets of American cities are probably not exceptionally cruel or brutal individuals, but ICE offers them a chance to advance their careers and to provide for their families. When they find themselves on a street in Los Angeles or Chicago, they do what the German soldiers did. They cooperate with the orders of their commanders, and they help their comrades to carry out the task they have been assigned. They follow orders. Our people are not different from the Germans. Ordinary Americans caught up in an evil system are capable of doing awful things.

Great Evil Develops Gradually 

Another lesson that we can draw from the Holocaust is that that extreme evil develops gradually. Over time, people come to support more and more extreme policies of violence. When Hitler was elected in 1932, most of his supporters probably did not envision the violence of 1938’s Kristalnacht when synagogues all over Germany were attacked. Those who participated in those attacks cannot all have envisioned the murders of tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine and Russia by the Einsatzgruppen after 1939, and even most members of the Einsatzgruppen did not foresee the deadly efficiency of the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem as carried out from 1942-45. Those who voted for Hitler in 1932 certainly did not foresee Auschwitz, Treblinka or Sobibor.

We should apply this lesson to the violence currently being perpetrated by ICE in the United States.  ICE started out by arresting people at the border who had crossed into the United States illegally. They then progressed to conducting street raids using masked gangs of agents in cities far from the border. Then the masked gangs started to raid workplaces. A recent raid on a construction site in Georgia netted hundreds of people. Then, a few days ago, a masked gang of Border Patrol agents conducted a raid at night on an apartment building in Chicago. According to Time magazine,

At around 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning, armed federal agents rappelled from helicopters onto the roof of a five-storey residential apartment in the South Shore of Chicago. The agents worked their way through the building, kicking down doors and throwing flash bang grenades, rounding up adults and screaming children alike, detaining them in zip-ties and arresting dozens, according to witnesses and local reporting.

This raid was a textbook example of the unreasonable searches and seizures that are banned by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Apparently, the raid was conducted without a warrant. Our government is using a claim that national security is endangered and that therefore, the president may take such extraordinary steps to protect the country. However, the claim has never been substantiated, and it appears to be no more than a pretext to ignore the Constitution. 

We Should Expect an Escalation of Violence

We should expect that, unless the national security claim is rejected by the Supreme Court, the use of unconstitutional violence will grow because the method that Trump is currently using to arrest and deport immigrants is far too slow and requires far too much manpower. He cannot achieve his goal by using the method he is now using. He will have to escalate to more extreme methods just as the Nazis did.

The gradual escalation of violence leading to the death camps of the Final Solution came about because eliminating millions of people is not easy. Shooting people - even in fairly large groups - is much too slow and requires far too much manpower. So, the Nazis invented an efficient industrial solution: Jews were shipped to the death camps by trainloads, and they were gassed and cremated when they arrived.

Trump's program of deporting undocumented immigrants faces the same problem that the Nazis faced. He cannot achieve his goal of deporting all of our undocumented immigrants by the end of his term using the method he is currently using. There are estimated to be at least ten million undocumented immigrants in the United States. How can so many people be arrested and deported? Can the president's current method achieve his goal? A little arithmetic will show that the current method cannot succeed.

The raid in Chicago mentioned above netted 37 people, and some of those were American citizens who had to be released. If the raid netted 30 candidates for deportation, how many such raids would be needed to deport all of our undocumented immigrants?

If we divide our 10 million undocumented immigrants by 30 (the number netted in the raid), we will see that at least 333,000 such raids would be required to arrest and deport all of our undocumented immigrants. However, Trump will continue as president for only a little more than three years - let us say 1200 days - and if ten such raids were conducted every day, he would have carried out only 12,000 raids by the end of his term, and he would have arrested only about 360,000 immigrants. Even if we doubled that number to 720,000, he would still have deported less than 10 percent of the undocumented immigrants in the United States. 

Clearly, he will have to find a more efficient solution to his problem. He will have to resort to more egregious violations of our constitutional rights, and he will have to use more extreme violence to achieve his goal. His policy of replacing officials who question his methods with people who are loyal to him is designed to facilitate his use of ever more extreme methods, and he will find as the Nazis did that plenty of good people trying to advance their careers will be available to carry out his program. We cannot allow that to happen.

We must resist!